Thursday, September 26, 2013

Fall is the season of books and provocative ideas, and author
Taylor Branch has no shortage of either.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian hopes to keep educators interested
in teaching about the civil rights era with the publication of “The King
Years,” a short version of his much-acclaimed trilogy on the life of Martin
Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

Last Saturday, he challenged his audience under a big tent at
the National Book Festival in Washington with an idea he said is both dangerous
and delicate. He’d sprung it last month on Gwen Ifill when she interviewed him for
the PBS NewsHour. Intrigued, Ifill gingerly broached the idea when she and Judy
Woodruff interviewed President Barack Obama a day later.

Obama “danced all around it,” Branch said.

Here it is: Obama is the victim of partisan racial gridlock.

Everyone agrees that Congress is dysfunctional and that the
tea party has put sand in the gears of Washington.

But is it accurate – or unfair -- to ascribe race as a motivator of partisan gridlock?

Even practiced interviewers like Ifill and veteran interviewees
like Obama get hives using the words race and racial. Ifill held the question until
last, and she used many words asking it. She asked the president if he agreed with
the historian “and, if so, what, if anything, the first African-American
president can do to break through that kind of motivated gridlock.”

The last thing Obama wants is to suggest that he considers
himself a victim of racism. He talked and talked. He went on for 647 words,
more than twice as many words as Lincoln used for the Gettysburg Address, and basically
Obama said no, he doesn’t think partisan gridlock is race-based.

But he did offer context to gridlock. Since the 1960s, Obama
said, people have fought government efforts to help minorities and the poor as
being bad for the economy, and that has led to thinking of government as the
problem instead of the solution. That in turn led to criticism that “pointy-headed
bureaucrats in Washington are just trying to help out minorities or trying to
give them something free.”

Bingo! Obama is thinking of the racism of George Wallace even
if he’s not talking about it.

In early 1963, Alabama’s governor declared, “Segregation
today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” As Branch tells it, the March
on Washington and other events convinced Wallace that talk of segregation and
race were unacceptable, and Wallace never mentioned them again.

Cruz said that he sent his very first political contribution
-- $10 -- to Helms because critics were “beating up on him.” Helms’s
“willingness to say all those crazy things is a rare, rare characteristic,”
Cruz said admiringly.

Cruz was 19 in 1990 when Helms ran a chilling campaign ad
against Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s black mayor. The ad showed a white man’s
hands crumpling up a job rejection letter. “You needed that job and you were
the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial
quota,” the voiceover said. Helms won his re-election bid.

Helms, unlike Strom Thurmond and Wallace, never recanted or
apologized for his use of racism as a political tactic.

In the 21st century, America needs to move
forward, not back. We can’t afford to listen to rhetoric from the bad old days,
whether we call it racially tinged or racist.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Thirty years ago, Democratic Rep. Patricia Schroeder
of Colorado said President Ronald Reagan had perfected the “Teflon-coated
presidency.”

Reagan could shed scandal the way Teflon allows eggs
to slide from a frying pan, she griped.

It was a great line but a bit of a stretch. Reagan
wasn’t as popular in office as all that. He became a conservative icon only in
retirement. Once, in a period of high unemployment in 1983, his job approval
rating dropped to 35 percent.

But he bounced back. Reagan’s genial manner
connected with voters even when corruption and other misdeeds afflicted his
administration. At this point in Reagan’s second term -- September 1985 -- 60
percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing, according to the Gallup
presidential tracking poll.

Sixty percent is hardly stellar, but it would be a
welcome gain for President Barack Obama, whose job approval rating hovers
around 45 percent, roughly the same as his predecessor, George W. Bush, in the
first September of his second term.

Reagan may
have had a Teflon coat, but later presidents have seemed wrapped in Velcro. In
these hyper-partisan times, both Obama and Bush have faced blame no matter what
they did. Just last Monday, when a gunman killed 12 people at the Washington
Navy Yard, Obama went forward with a speech criticizing Republicans on the
economy.

The extent of the carnage wasn’t known when Obama, at
the Old Executive Office Building, said, “We are confronting yet another mass
shooting.” After speaking for about two minutes
on the tragic event, he turned to his prepared remarks and criticized
Republicans for threatening a government shutdown that could imperil the
economy.

Republicans blasted the president as callous, but
had he scrapped his planned remarks and focused on, say, tougher gun control
measures, he would have been accused of using the massacre for political advantage.
He can’t win.

Reagan never had to worry about opponents wielding
lightning-fast tweets. Even before Obama was criticized for keeping to his
schedule during a tragedy, critics raked him over the blogosphere for his handling
of Syria. Before that, opponents eviscerated him for his health care plan. It stops
insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing
conditions and helps millions of Americans get affordable health insurance, but
most people don’t know that.

A majority of people still disapprove of Obamacare,
and about one in four say lawmakers should do whatever they can to make it
fail, according to the latest Pew Research Center and USA Today poll.

Obama seems to think that Americans are reasonable
people and will see the advantages of his plan. He has never yet used the most
power piece of real estate he controls – the Oval Office – for a televised
address to the nation on health care. Why not?

It’s hard to imagine Great Communicator Reagan missing
that opportunity. Reagan set the record for televised Oval Office addresses,
speaking to the nation from the big desk 34 times. By this time in his presidency, he had spoken two dozen times from the Oval
Office.

The Obama team has no shortage of tweeters who tweet,
but the boss has given only two prime-time, Oval Office addresses. They were three
years ago, one about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and one on the end of
combat operations in Iraq.

Obama’s predecessor
also was no fan of the Oval Office address. Bush gave six major Oval Office
addresses during his two terms.

Some Obama advisers dismiss the Oval Office address
as a relic of the last century. Yes, times have changed since Reagan could
announce a prime-time speech, assured that the three major TV networks would
carry it and that his message would dominate the next day’s news.

But the Oval Office is still the most powerful room in
America. Obama apparently prefers walking down the hall and standing at the
lectern in the East Room, as if he’s at a news conference when he isn’t.

My guess is Obama may yet resort to another Oval
Office speech, but his delay has cost him. He gets zero credit for slowing the
rate of health care cost inflation and all the blame for businesses’ deciding
to stop providing health insurance to employees.

He promised people who
get insurance through their jobs that they’d be able to keep their plans. He apparently
did not foresee that some big companies would use the changing insurance landscape
as an opportunity to cut back on benefits.

Obama doesn’t have a Teflon presidency, and it will
take more than tweets to unwrap his Velcro coat. The Oval Office is waiting.

Today, many people might find it hard to place the 31st
president. Hoover won the 1928 election in a landslide, only to see his popularity
and prestige evaporate as the economy collapsed in the Great Depression. His name became synonymous with misery.

Hoovervilles were the shantytowns that sprang up when the
homeless sought refuge in cardboard and scrap metal shacks. Hoover blankets were
newspapers stuffed inside coats to keep out the cold; Hoover Pullmans were the
rail boxcars that desperate people rode to start life anew.

Hoover blamed congressional foes for refusing to enact his
programs to deal with the crisis, although he arguably worsened the Depression
by signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill in 1930. Aimed at protecting American
farmers and businesses, the law raised the average import tax to about 40
percent.

A visit to the presidential retreat provides a sympathetic,
personal portrait of a beleaguered president and his independent wife. Byrd Visitors Center has a first-rate exhibit
about the history of the park and the Hoovers’ getaway. The park
service’s free bus tours start from the center. There
I met Bill Jones, a newly retired teacher who, in his first summer as a
seasonal naturalist park ranger, became intrigued by the Hoovers and started
reading everything he could find on them.

Hoover’s life is a classic American success story, says
Jones, whose enthusiasm is infectious. Hoover, the son of a Quaker blacksmith
in Iowa, was orphaned by age 10 and was sent to live with relatives in Oregon. He
was graduated in the first class at Stanford, where he met his future wife, Lou
Henry, the university’s first woman geology graduate. She, like Hoover, loved the outdoors.

Hoover made a fortune as a mining engineer and became known
as a humanitarian during and after World War I, leading U.S. food relief
efforts in Europe that fed more than 300 million people.

Hoover’s program cut Americans’ food consumption 15 percent without rationing,
through such voluntary efforts as wheatless, meatless and porkless meals and days
every week.

Even before his 1929 inauguration,
then in March, Hoover realized he’d need to escape the “pneumatic hammer” of
the nation’s capital. He wanted a rustic place within 100 miles of Washington,
at an elevation above 2,500 feet to be free of disease-carrying mosquitoes and the
capital’s sweltering heat and humidity in those pre-air conditioning days, and
a good trout stream to satisfy his passion for fishing. He found it at the
headwaters of the Rapidan River in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Hoover, who refused a salary as president, paid for the 164
acres and the furnishings himself, and the Marines built the 13 buildings as a
training assignment. The presidential hideaway had a mess hall to serve 20,
horse stables, a trout hatchery, a town hall and guest cabins. Building Camp
Rapidan, as the Hoovers called it, meant more roads, electricity and telephone
lines into the remote mountains. They entertained frequently, and their guest
list was a “who’s who” of American business and government.

“I have discovered that even the work of government can be
improved by leisurely discussions of its problems out under the trees where no
bells or callers jar one’s thoughts,” Hoover said.

After using the camp from 1929 to 1933, the Hoovers gave it to
the federal government, with the idea that it would be used by future
presidents. FDR visited once and found the terrain too challenging. He built his
presidential retreat, Shangri-la, in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. President
Dwight Eisenhower renamed it Camp David.

Visitors today can go inside two of the three buildings still
standing at Camp Hoover, including the Hoovers’ simple cottage, which they had painted
brown to contrast with the ornate White House and its political noise, worries and
cares. The camp remains as secluded in the mountains as Hoover’s life is in the
public memory.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

President Theodore Roosevelt’s 20th
century admonition that in foreign affairs it’s best to “speak softly but carry
a big stick” is getting a 21st century makeover.

President Barack Obama speaks softly but he wants
Congress to help wield the stick.

On the verge of authorizing limited military strikes
against Syria, the president pivoted when expected support disappeared. The
United Nations is “paralyzed,” he said, and even ally Great Britain declined to
get involved after a negative vote in Parliament. More than 200 members of
Congress had signed letters urging Obama to seek congressional approval before
taking action.

And so he paused the march to war, or missile
strikes, and launched a campaign to win congressional and international approval
to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against
his people.

“Our democracy is stronger when the president and
the people’s representatives stand together,” Obama said.

For the president, the move is as risky as it was
surprising. Congress and the president rarely stand or even sit together, and approval
is far from assured. So while the Senate convened hearings, Obama and his team tried
to marshal the power of persuasion on TV and in closed-door meetings.

In a sign of the showdown looming on Capitol Hill
this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 10 to 7 Wednesday to
support the limited use fo force. Obama faces opposition from progressive
Democrats as well as from isolationist Republicans.

U.S.
officials say conclusive evidence shows that about 2:30 in the morning of Aug.
21, rockets carrying sarin nerve gas blasted the sleeping suburbs of Damascus. Among
the more than 1,400 people killed were 426 children.

Obama conceded that Americans are war
weary, but he asked: “What message will we send
if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no
price?”

What, indeed? Once
again, though, the age-old debate between intervention and isolation is playing
out on Capitol Hill.

Since President
George Washington warned against permanent alliances with foreign countries,
Americans have been leery of taking a role in foreign conflicts.

World War I was supposed to be an exception. President Woodrow Wilson argued that it was in our
national interest to maintain a peaceful world order. After the war to end all wars, memories of horrific casualties sent us back
to the anti-intervention corner.

In the 1940s, it took the surprise Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor to galvanize Americans behind the war. And only after 9/11 did
we take the plunge in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This time? Questions abound about the goals and
consequences of air strikes and an exit strategy, but Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.,
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says he believes Congress ultimately
will rise to the occasion.

“This isn’t about Barack Obama vs. the Congress,”
Rogers told CNN. “This isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. This has a very
important worldwide reach in this decision.”

But Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and others say military
action in Syria would be a mistake. Paul predicted the Senate will back Obama
but on NBC’s “Meet the Press” gave the odds of “at least 50-50 whether the
House will vote down involvement in the Syrian war.”

Obama needs Congress’
blessing now in the event future crises require military intervention. He’s
caught between the rock and hard place of his own words. His assertion that
the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that demanded retaliation had forced
his hand while his remarks as a presidential candidate held him back:

“The president does not have power under the
Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that
does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” he told
the Boston Globe in 2007.

Obama surely has learned through experience how much
easier it is to campaign than to govern. Governing requires hard choices and speaking
softly. It’s time for Congress to back the president on use of the big stick.